Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/16

12 civilized world became stimulated to new thoughts and to new enterprises, one might almost say it became intoxicated with great ideas and great ventures.

Natural science was the last field of thought to feel the new impulse, and in chemistry there was little evidence of progress until the sixteenth century. The representative chemical authors known to the fifteenth century were Arnald of Villanova, the unknown writers who wrote under the name of Raimundus Lullus (or Lully) and unknown writers who wrote chemistry under the name of Gheber, or of Albertus Magnus. All these writings were obscure in style and contributed little to the knowledge of chemistry or to clear thinking. The chemists of the period might be classified into two groups—artisans who were not generally of university education, working by traditional methods in their respective arts and not addicted to writing or philosophizing; and the learned class, usually physicians, sometimes clericals. Some interest in chemistry existed but was mainly confined to the efforts to discover the transmutation of metals or the elixir of life. Chemical facts were at times developed by their efforts, but disappointments and disillusions had brought the chemical theories of the ancients and alchemists into general stagnation and disrepute. Cornelius Agrippa, writing about 1530, quotes a proverb of the time—"An alchymist is either a physician or a soap boiler."

Four men notably mark the beginning of a new era in chemical activity, Theophrastus von Hohenheim (called Paracelsus), Georg Bauer (called Agricola), Vannuccio Biringuccio and Bernard Palissy.

Paracelsus was born in Switzerland in 1493; Agricola in Saxony in 1494; Biringuccio of Siena, Italy, probably about the same time; while Palissy was born in France and his birth year is variously given as 1499 and 1510.

We can better appreciate the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the period in which these men lived if we recall that the span of their lives touched the life times of Michelangelo, Macchiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Ariosto, Rafael, Rabelais, Copernicus, Vesalius, Thomas More, Columbus, Cortez, Cardanus, Martin Luther, Erasmus and Savonarola.

Three of the four chemists mentioned—Agricola, Biringuccio and Palissy—may be said, each in his own line and country, to have laid the foundations of modern chemical technology. Each of them wrote an almost epoch-making work in a particular field of applied chemistry and exerted a powerful impetus toward raising the profession of technical chemist above the rank of Agrippa's "soap-boiler."

Biringuccio's work was published in 1540 in Italian under the title of "Pirotechnia." It treats of the metals, the semi-metals, their ores and minerals, and of some salts; of the alloys of the metals, their manufacture and uses. It contains also recipes for the use of the goldsmiths, the potters and other artisans. It is important as an